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Category: candy

With a few days’ lull in events for Cakewalk, I’ve been cleaning my house. I mean seriously cleaning: not just moving the piles around to vacuum under them, but actually going through the piles and finding field trip permission slips that should have been turned in three years ago, and a Real Simple magazine from months back that promises “MORE TIME FOR YOU: Find Extra Minutes Every Day” “Hall of Fame Time-Savers” “Short-Cut Dinners” “Problem-Solving Products” — any and all of which I’m sure I would have found really useful except that I have never had the time to open the magazine. Into the recycling pile it goes.

In five days I’ve finished the laundry room, the main bathroom, the linen closet, my bedroom, and the major coup of getting my husband to give up the big closet he’s insisted he needed for the last 18 years. For the first time in almost two decades I now have all of my clothes in one place, rather than broadcast over four locations throughout the house. Several times a day I’ve opened my pristine closet, organized and color-coded, just to stand there and admire.

Since yesterday I’ve been working on my terrifying study, which is not much bigger than the closet but has over one thousand books in it, as well as all my desultory papers and file boxes of book research and weird random stuff, like a full-body fox stole that guards my 1920s Underwood typewriter…

…a collection of birds’ nests and another of miscellaneous doll parts…

…samples of mineral pigments and a dried lotus blossom from Aswan that, if you put it in water, would smell just like it did when it was fresh. I’ve got an old farmhouse wardrobe that is filled with nothing but foreign editions of Wintering. Where are you supposed to put such things, your two dozen copies of your own novel in Estonian?

One of my favorite treasures in my study is the box that my rabies vaccine came in. On one of my trips to Egypt to research my new novel, I was bitten by a rabid dog. Rabies is so common in Egypt that there are whole hospitals devoted to it, but my bite merited only a bored glance from one of the rabies doctors, even though a chunk of my calf the size of a golf ball was missing. “Just go to the pharmacy,” the doctor said wearily as she pushed an elevator button to escape me. At Egyptian pharmacies you can simply order the rabies vaccine series over the counter, which is what I did. That was easy — getting away from the leering male pharmacists who kept insisting that I needed to have each of the series of shots administered to my bare derriere, with every man in the pharmacy in attendance, was the hard part. The strange part was the vaccine box, which is illustrated with a photograph of a friendly-looking golden retriever:

Except if you look more closely, you see that someone has drawn the notorious rabies slobber all over the dog’s lips:

The cartoonish drool looks like a 7-year-old drew it, but it gets the point across.

There’s so much stuff in my tiny cabinet of curiosities of a study that I am not sure how to get it orderly enough to keep working in it, but I’m trying. One of the problems is the Wall of Books: these are not my reference books — the hundreds of books I use for my current book project — but the myriad novels, poetry, and quirky nonfiction title that are lined up and ready to be read, as well as the piles of same that I’ve read but can’t put away elsewhere in the house because I haven’t cataloged them yet.

When I read I underline anything I think might be useful to my work — vocabulary words, memorable phrases and unique metaphors — and then I catalog all that I’ve underlined in electronic files. It takes a couple of hours per book to record my notes, and I’ve fallen far behind. I mean years behind. The neurotic in me can’t put those books away until I’ve cataloged them, so I’m basically drowning in a sea of books that never go away.

Which brings me to Janet Frame’s Faces in the Water, her second novel, based on her experience in a mental hospital. Frame is one of my very favorite writers, a true genius whose excruciating sensitivity was both her burden and her gift. This is how her narrator in Faces in the Water describes what happened to her:

“I was put in hospital because a great gap opened in the ice floe between myself and the other people whom I watched, with their world drifting away through a violet-colored sea where hammerhead sharks in tropical ease swam side by side with the seals and the polar bears.”

Faces in the Water is one of my Uncataloged Books, and I think it’s now been waiting its turn in my study for eight years. So it’s not like it’s here because of Cakewalk, but in that weird numinous way these things happen, when I picked it up to dust under it, this is the passage the book opened to:

“The nurses, feeling bored because there hadn’t been a recent fight, would fetch a bag of sweets from the tin which was bought every fortnight as part of the Social Security allowance for the patients. The lollies would be showered into the middle of the day room and it would be first come first served with fights developing, people being put in strait jackets, whistles blowing; and the tension which mounted and reached its peak at intervals — both in the patients and in the nurses who long ago had to suppress any desire to ‘nurse’ and were now overworked and degraded, in many a case sadistic, custodians — found its release, for a time.

After a lolly scramble, when the fights had been dealt with, there was unusual quietness and dreaminess and sometimes laughter, and those who had been successful in the rush held tight to their sweet sticky booty. The toffees always had the same taste, of dark swampy syrup that made one feel sick and at the same time gave comfort…

My own taste for toffees came at night when, being hurried along the corridor to bed, I felt such pangs of hunger that I became skillful at darting unobserved into the open pantry, and sometimes snatching a handful of toffees from a newly opened tin. But that was a rare occasion. More often I seized in one hand a slice of bread from the bin and delved honey from a large tin, pasting it, ants and all, with my fingers across the bread, and thrusting the whole in the sweaty hairy hollow under my arm, and withdrawing it and eating it, salt and sweet and gritty, in the quiet of my room.”

Despite my peeping about Easter being my favorite holiday, how I love all the frills and frippery and fakey grass, blah blah, this year the Easter Bunny kind of laid an egg. Maybe not as far as the kids were concerned – Celeste and our three visiting juvenile friends from Brooklyn still got baskets turgid with fuzzy chicks and amusing toys and chocolate and jelly beans, and prodigal son Zachary, spending his junior year abroad, got an Easter treat befitting a 21-year-old reading classics at Oxford: a copy of an audacious first novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey. But all parents know that the primary reason to overload kids with candy at Easter and Halloween is to benefit said parents, who will be tiptoeing across darkened children’s rooms late at night for weeks to come, palming through the beribboned baskets or plastic jack-o-lanterns for a handful of Reese’s miniatures or malted milk balls, girding themselves for daylight’s less-than-sweet aspects of adult responsibility.

Thus in the two decades since I became a mother my Easter palate has become more selective, since junk candy from Walgreen’s is not what I want when I ransack the baskets as my offspring snore gently in their beds: I want the See’s Candy decorated chocolate buttercream egg, heavy as a hand grenade, to hack my way through in the privacy of my midnight kitchen, or a few post-modernist truffles from Joseph Schmidt, San Francisco’s answer to Willie Wonka. When Easter approacheth I have been known to drive all over the Bay Area and pore through catalogs and troll the Internet for the most adorable, delectable treats, tucking them into papier-mâché eggs and crinkly cellophane bags sealed with baby animal stickers in my quest not just for the eventuality of pleasurable parental consumption, but to be the cleverest, most imaginative Easter Bunny ever.

But not this year. This year, the Easter Bunny spent the month of March on post-operative nursing duty, for her husband is parked on the couch with the television remote and two new, virtually unused titanium knees. When she is not plumping pillows and doling out oxycontin the Easter Bunny has been driving the girls chorus carpool every afternoon, boiling rice and chicken breasts for a dog with acute digestive problems, and writing thank-you notes to high school admissions directors at 2 a.m.. Not to mention the depressing stress of starting the South Beach Diet (who cares about no starch and no booze? The trauma is no sugar!) to prepare for the publication of my book about my lifelong, frantic consumption of sugar. To make things even more challenging from the candy-foraging perspective, trusty and tasty See’s closed their flagship store – a mere five-minute stroll from the tired Easter Bunny’s house (See’s, how could you? Why do you think I moved to this neighborhood?!). Joseph Schmidt, too, went into retirement and locked the doors of his Wonkaesque shop.

So this year’s baskets, architected via Walgreen’s and a single rushed trip to Target, were kind of lame. Lots of chocolate that tasted like wax. Jelly beans with no flavor whatsoever. Funny — mediocre candy is not like mediocre wine: it does not start to taste better the more you have. Okay, so I was cheating on my diet, and it wasn’t even worth the guilt. If you’re going to cheat, you might as well cheat with some real candy with quality control. Using the excuse that I had essential errands to run for invalids and teenagers, I escaped my house and headed for The Candy Store.

The Candy Store opened in my neighborhood a couple of years ago. It looks like an apothecary designed by the Jetsons, with a stylized black-and-blue logo and glass jars lining the walls, all of them filled with something fabulous, like chunks of toffee rolled in peanut butter and then dipped in milk chocolate, or gummy butterflies, or green-apple gum balls. It’s fun just knowing that there’s a dedicated candy store three blocks from my house, and the owners, Diane and Brian Campbell, are so friendly and good-natured they tend to offer you a sample if you stare too long at one of the jars on display.

I usually leave with a handful of mixed Swiss Fruits because they look like doll house food: tiny dimpled oranges and blushed green pears and miniature bananas speckled microscopically with brown. But today I wanted something really great, not just the usual, something that would override the taste of carnauba wax from the Brach’s jelly beans I choked down by the handful last night. The first thing I noticed at The Candy Store was a display of coconut & Hawaiian pink salt brittle. Brian makes the brittle in small batches, toasting the organic coconut he uses, and I could smell it even through the cellophane bags.

The Candy Store's handmade brittle

As I chatted with Diane at the counter while paying for my brittle, she noticed me eyeing a polka-dotted box of something wrapped in waxed paper. “Those are amazing,” she told me. “They’re marshmallows covered in a salted caramel with a little cocoa and three kinds of roasted nuts. A woman in the East Bay makes them.” She continued under her breath. “I think they’re my favorite candy in the store right now. No – I think these may be the best candy I’ve ever had.”

Diane knows her candy, and even though they were pricey at $3 a piece, with that endorsement I had to try one. I took my bag of high quality candy, picked up a cup of tea to go around the corner, and drove off to do my real errands.

Ten minutes later I pulled my car over to the curb so that I could call Diane back at The Candy Store. I’d already broken into the coconut brittle, which was brilliant, the crunch and toastiness of the coconut and blonde brittle balanced with savory sweetness. But the caramel-covered marshmallow – something about its combination of textures and flavors, the slight bitterness of the dark, nut-flecked caramel with its hint of chocolate against the airy, melting marshmallow, was staggering. I’d eaten it in one bite and unlike most sweets, it was so completely satisfying that was all I needed. That one perfect mouthful.

“You were right,” I told Diane on the phone. “That marshmallow-caramel thing ties for the most amazing piece of candy I’ve ever had”—I thought quickly to the unforgettable rose-flavored Turkish delight my family bought a couple of years ago at a gas station not far from the ruins of the ancient city of Termessos, a candy so tender and perfumed and beautifully pure I would have wept except that I was too busy elbowing the rest of my family away from the box as they wolfed it down. Later we learned that we’d stumbled into the village renowned for making the best Turkish delight in the country. Now my other best candy is right around the corner from my house. Even at $3 a pop, it’s a lot cheaper than going back to Turkey.

BonBonBar's SCN Caramallows and my grandmother's toy tea set

You too can buy that marshmallow-caramel thing, called a Salted Chocolate Nut Caramallow and made by Nina Wanat of BonBonBar, through The Candy Store. You can buy Brian Campbell’s brittles, too, if you’re lucky – they tend to sell out the day they’re made.

Coconut & Hawaiian Pink Salt Brittle reposing before it disappears

And Nina Wanat, who left the film industry and then law school to start making really good candy, has a blog about dessert called Sweet Napa, where you can find out more about BonBonBar. After the salty-sweet SCN Caramallow and the coconut brittle, and my fond memories of that rosy Turkish delight, I’m ready to try Nina’s recipe for a rosewater-flavored pavlova.

Why, you may wonder, would I so debase my MacBook with Easter candy that only the experts at Apple’s Genius Bar will be able to return it to its pristine, pre-decorated, unsticky state? It’s because this is the first installment of my Cakewalk outtakes, the stories and recipes that didn’t make it into the book because my life seems to exert an excessive, even gravitational pull on sugar in every form. Some people remember what they wore or what the weather was like during the important episodes of their lives; I remember what I had for dessert.

So here, just in time for Easter, is the story of how a passion for Peeps — those squat chorus lines of yellow marshmallow chicks — ended my age of innocence…

Peep Show!

In part because of its close proximity to my April birthday, Easter was my favorite holiday. In my child’s megalomania, the glories of Easter were an extension of my birthday’s centrality. I also loved the new itchy dresses and lace-cuffed socks and slick pairs of white Mary Janes and the big fat basket overflowing with bad candy. I fervently believed in the Easter Bunny as well as every other assorted magical agent of childhood bounty. Thanks to the zealous example set by my Irish Roman Catholic relatives, I’d turned into an extremely pious little girl who took First Communion early because our parish priest in Sonoma had singled me out to the nuns and the rest of the catechism class as a true student of God. Nevertheless, in a bizarre theological misapprehension, I had decided that the Easter Bunny was some sort of understudy for the Lamb of God, who I assumed was too frail and bandy-legged to make the Easter egg rounds.

I felt the great, self-aggrandizing weight of my holiness when I became a communicant, and I remember lying in my bunk bed on Saturday nights, the sparkles in the cottage cheese of the asbestos-sprayed ceiling winking an arm span from my face as I concocted bogus confessions designed to make me look noble in the eyes of the Lord: “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I planned to save my artichoke heart for my little brother, but I was so weary from helping my mother change the cat litter that I forgot and ate it myself. What should my penance be?” This was the kind of spiritual subterfuge I used to mask the overarching corruption that I feared was really inside me.

Our priest had admonished me one day as we watched my uncle arrive on his new motorcycle for dinner at our house. “Oh man!” I’d chortled as Uncle Bill rolled into our cul-de-sac on a shiny chrome Harley Davidson, twisting his wrists to make the engine roar for the benefit of all the kids squealing on the sidewalk. “Don’t say ‘man,’” our priest corrected me, his voice stern and disapproving. My face flamed. “You’ve just taken the Lord’s name in vain,” he continued. “Say ‘gee’ or ‘gosh’ instead. I think you’d better perform the Act of Contrition.”

A few months before, near Christmas, I’d been daily inspecting the pile of presents growing under the tree, and one day noticed a paper shopping bag had been left sitting out on the sofa, probably unintentionally. I knew my mother had taken my four-year-old brother shopping; I couldn’t resist peeking inside the bag, hoping I’d find something for myself. I did: a set of inexpensive metal bird pins on a sheet of flimsy cardboard, the kind of thing they carried at the Sprouse Reitz five-and-dime a couple of blocks from our house. My first reaction was an internal this chintzy thing?, swiftly followed by my mortified conscience’s chastisement – my brother John-John was little and he had no money and his two front teeth were black from falling on his face at the last Fourth of July picnic, but still he’d thought to get me a present. I slipped the sheet of pins back into the bag and told no one, but on Christmas morning I fought back hot guilty tears as I exclaimed over John-John’s gift.

For months after my First Communion I practically hummed with anticipation on Sunday mornings, because I loved the taste and texture of the Host, and I prayed, literally, that the hippies wouldn’t ruin church again. A couple of times the dawning of the age of Aquarius had too much infected our liberal winemaking parish community, in my estimation: somebody had gotten the idea to pass around real bread and real wine during communion instead of the flat pressed wafers I jonesed for all through the week. I didn’t mind the guitar strumming to “Kumbaya” and “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” but handing me a cube of sourdough instead of a cookie was just not okay.

One weekend when my grandmother was visiting, communion had been normal, thank God, and I was swinging my legs in the church pew, watching as everyone else made the circuit up to the altar and back to their places, heads bowed in transcendent gratitude. For my part I was grateful that children had been invited up to the altar first. As my parents and grandmother shuffled through the line I was thoroughly and privately appreciating my Host, which was stuck to the roof of my mouth, spongy and thin like a Swedish wafer or the last bite of a waffle cone. I knew it was a sin to chew the Host. I didn’t want to – I wanted it to last as long as possible, like a Tootsie Roll Pop. But instead of finding a chocolatey surprise at the center of the sucker, I was going to heaven. All of a sudden my arm nearly jerked out of its socket, and my scandalized grandmother snapped at me, “That’s the body of Christ. You’re not supposed to enjoy it.” The ensuing taste of shame was all but confirmation that deep down, I really was probably bad. What could I do but pray I wasn’t?

We spent every Easter at the sprawling, relaxed home of my mother’s Aunt Helen, who lived at the top of a hill in a sun belt across the bay from San Francisco. This was my “other” Aunt Helen, one of two, but the good one: related by desire rather than by blood. She was married to my grandfather’s best friend from college, and she’d come to California from Georgia as a war bride. Aunt Helen earned her title as my mother’s favorite relative by painting my three-year-old mom’s fingernails with bright red polish the day she arrived. A couple of times a year I was invited to Aunt Helen’s for a sleepover by myself, and she and my teenage cousin Peggy would paint my nails and take me out for a ladies’ lunch of Waldorf salad, followed by a trip to the local toy store. While I played with my new Little Kiddles dolls, Peggy played with my hair and Aunt Helen made my favorite dinner, buttery lima beans with bacon and even more buttery pecan pie, its thick caramelized filling heady with bourbon, Aunt Helen pouring herself “a finger or two” of the Four Roses she used in the pie.

On Easter there was a massive hillside egg hunt for the kids before the whole family and lots of friends and neighbors gorged on a buffet of ham and scalloped potatoes and more pecan pie and what Aunt Helen called “your mother’s heavenly ambrosia,” purring the word ambrosia in her susurrous Georgian drawl, even though it went by the more prosaic title Five Cup Salad on the recipe printed on the label of the requisite canned pineapple chunks my mom used. Later in the afternoon, everyone stripped off their holiday finery and lounged around the pool, the adults holding their sweat-beaded cocktail glasses out of beach ball range and surreptitiously lifting malted robin’s eggs and jelly beans from nearby baskets, the kids wrapped in sopping towels reading Archie comics on the scorching pool pavement or playing loud, splashy games of Marco Polo.

Easter at Aunt Helen’s was, to my mind, genuinely miraculous: when I was four, my older brother Billy found a trembling black-and-white bunny in his basket – the memory of its impossibly soft fur and pale, twitching nose was far more indelible than its almost immediate expiration. Another year, Peggy got a long-legged baby goat wearing a wide satin ribbon and chewing through the rope that tied it to the pool house door. Another time my big cousin Mark took us one by one into his bedroom, where a Great Dane puppy was sleeping in a wicker dog bed, safe from the hubbub of the egg hunt outside, its tawny ribcage peacefully rising and falling.

The year I turned seven I was sure it was my big Easter year. I’d had my First Communion triumph and something profound was sure to happen to me. At the very least it was my turn to get a real live animal. Whether my family needed an addition to its ever-increasing menagerie was irrelevant – I was the next oldest kid in the clan, and as far as I was concerned I was entitled. My grandmother had driven me up to Aunt Helen’s on Good Friday, and until my mother arrived on Saturday I’d been too fawned over to indulge in potentially disquieting contemplation of the holy trinity of my flawed character – greed, lack of impulse control, and illicit curiosity – let alone to snoop around for muffled bleats and chirps from behind closed doors, or to look for any other telltale clues that I was indeed the most virtuous, deserving and rewardable child in the family.

Somehow I found myself unchaperoned late on the afternoon of Holy Saturday. My mother had arrived and she and my grandmother and Aunt Helen had huddled off together somewhere within the spreading, tiled expanse of the Mediterranean-style house. Who knows where my uncle was, I don’t recall even wondering; I was still at the age when grown men were mere passing satellites to the more attractive orbit of females. My cousin Peggy had gamely painted my fingernails and then wandered away to “check on” something mumbled vaguely about as she escaped me. And this is where memory becomes distinct: the late sunlight banding through the glass slats of the bathroom window next to Peggy’s bedroom. The cool shaded green of her floral wallpaper. The frilly blue tuxedo shirt and lumpy neck acne of her junior prom date in the photograph on her vanity dresser. The collapsing stack of Teen Beat magazines on the floor of her dark closet, and behind them, me poking around until I found a grocery bag of plastic eggs and, on top, the cardboard carton of marshmallow Peeps, which I was holding when I heard footsteps approach and grow decidedly louder and suddenly I was trapped unseen in Peggy’s bedroom with my mother and my grandmother, and my mother’s voice was moving into the accusatory register of a conspiracy gone sour.

The family apocrypha regarding my grandmother’s absent-mindedness reads like this: her children once watched her measure out and dump an entire cup of whole black peppercorns into a pot of stew as she was quizzing them on their homework. More than once she unpinned her hat and put it carefully away in the icebox. When the family moved from San Francisco to Pennsylvania, my grandmother boarded a cross-country train alone with her two small children and didn’t notice until she was in the dining car that she was wearing a slip but had left her skirt behind. She once made the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle for driving her car with calm but unfathomable concentration straight through the plate-glass window of a Venetian blind store. In the newspaper photograph, she is holding her face in her hands, her hat daintily askew, her mouth open in an astonished, perfect O, like a doddering old-lady version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” This is how I picture her looking as my mother interrogated her about the missing forty Easter baskets, which had somehow dematerialized from the trunk of my grandparents’ car.

Finding the Peeps in the closet had already muddied the filtered waters of my innocence. Snooping had netted me a bagful of Easter candy I hadn’t really wanted to find. I tried to convince myself that the Peeps I’d seen were just, well, maybe Peggy’s surplus candy from last year . . . but the conversation I was overhearing was really testing my faith.

My mother and my grandmother left the room, my mother sputtering that the stores were already closed and she didn’t know how they would replace forty baskets let alone all that candy, and I started praying. Dear God, Saint Jude and Baby Jesus, I prayed, please let that whole scene be a bad dream and I promise to stop being such a vain, terrible child. I know it’s all my fault. You can forget the pony – just let there really be an Easter Bunny and I’ll be good forever. Or something to that effect.

Needless to say that a dark sleepless night in Peggy’s trundle bed finally faded into a rudely bright and suspense-plagued Easter morning, and when all of us kids were assembled that afternoon for the annual egg hunt, fresh from church in our stiff dresses and cinched-up seersucker pants, we found – under the bushes, down the crumbling chimney of the brick barbecue, tucked onto windowsills and hanging from the rafters of the covered patio – Easter baskets, but not the wide-rimmed, beribboned wicker extravaganzas we usually got. That year’s baskets were improvisations cobbled together by the clever but desperate: grass-filled colanders and green plastic strawberry containers, scuffed sand pails and crêpe-paper covered shoeboxes fitted with twine handles. There were plenty of colored hard-boiled eggs in the flowerbeds, and here and there a lonely marshmallow Peep or a plastic egg rattling with two or three pitiful jelly beans inside. I lugged my sagging grocery-bag-cum-Easter basket up and down the hillside, grief stricken, while Peggy’s goat gnawed its way out of its pen and slipped into the house unobserved, where it ate an entire toilet seat.

They’d asked me to accept that a sticky wafer sprinkled with wine was the body and blood of Jesus Christ, who died for the sins of the world, including my own. Yeah, right, said my sinful, disappointed seven-year-old self. But somehow, nearly four decades later, I can take one bite of sugar-sprinkled marshmallow and remember what it tasted like to believe.

. . .

…Sorry. I just can’t give you a recipe involving Peeps. As an adult, they make the enamel on my teeth curl back like wood shavings, though one of my cats likes them.

My feline secretaries cleaning up after the photo shoot.

Minerva, head of the secretarial pool, adjusts Peeps placement for regifting.